From National Review:
‘Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.” —Canadian “Human Rights” Investigator Dean Steacy, responding to the question “What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?”
This is the way free speech ends, not with a bang but as the result of an administrative hearing in a windowless basement in Vancouver, Canada.
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At issue is a cover story National Review’s own Mark Steyn wrote for the Canadian newsweekly Maclean’s, titled “The Future Belongs to Islam.” An excerpt from Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone, the article highlighted the fact that demographic trends suggest that Muslims may well become a majority in much of Europe and that this obviously represents a threat to Europe as we know it.
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In 1977, the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) was founded “to investigate and try to settle complaints of discrimination in employment and in the provision of services within federal jurisdiction.” While their mandate was suspiciously vague from the get-go, even those involved with the founding of the CHRC admit that it was never intended to do anything as abhorrent as regulate speech. At the outset, the commission’s responsibilities were fairly straightforward, e.g. investigating cases of discriminatory hiring practices within the government, discriminatory housing practices, and other cases in which someone might be subject to prejudice in an area under the purview of the federal government.
But with almost Newtonian certainty, bureaucratic power tends to expand over time, and so it was with the CHRC. In 1979, the commission set its sights on John Ross Taylor, leader of the Western Guard Party, an unsavory white-supremacist group. The commission found Taylor guilty of violating Canada’s human-rights legislation for distributing a phone number that provided anti-Semitic recorded messages.
Now whatever you think of Taylor, he wasn’t broadcasting hate speech: One had to make the specific effort to call the number to hear his nasty messages. So Taylor filed an appeal on the grounds that the Human Rights Commission had denied him his right to free speech.
By 1990, the case finally wound up before the Supreme Court of Canada, in Canada (Human rights commission) v. Taylor. At issue were two conflicting pieces of law. First, section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act:
13. (1) It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.
And of course the Canadian Charter of Rights (similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights), which one would think is pretty clear:
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
a) freedom of conscience and religion;
b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;
c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and
d) freedom of association.
Supreme Court of Canada split 4-3 on a decision that declared that section 13.1 of the Canadian Human Rights Act did not violate the charter of rights, and it remains constitutional. Oh sure, the justices in favor made grumblings about applying a high standard when enforcing the Human Rights Act, but despite their admonition, the general interpretation by the human-rights commissions is that they now have free rein to regulate the media. The slippery slope has been a toboggan ride to hell ever since.
What this means is that everyone in Canada now has fundamental freedoms, provided they’re not in conflict with whatever specious definition of “human rights” the CHRC chooses to apply. The threshold for conviction set by the Human Rights Act is incredibly low, because its highly subjective language means that “likely to cause contempt” is as good as a preponderance of evidence establishing guilt. There’s also the matter of the commission’s tribunals, which — unlike legal proceedings — are largely administrative in nature, so there’s little in the way of formal rules of evidence or procedure. There are few things in life more terrifying than being dragged into court knowing ahead of time that truth isn’t necessarily a defense and that the judge is winging it.
As a result, the Canadian Human Rights Commission is stunningly effective: In its 31 years of existence, not a single complaint brought before it has been dismissed. That’s right: Everyone is guilty before God and the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
But that’s only half the story. With the legal hurdles cleared, the national commission wasn’t alone in being empowered — the regional Human Rights Commissions and their corresponding tribunals were too. There’s a labyrinthine series of these kangaroo courts in Canada; there are also the provincial human-rights commissions and their corresponding tribunals, each with its own differing laws.
So when a group of Muslim law students filed suit against Steyn and Maclean’s, they didn’t just go to the CHRC. They also went jurisdiction-shopping. In addition to the national complaint, they filed complaints with the British Columbia and Ontario tribunals as well, as those were the two provincial commissions whose laws they felt would be most favorable to their case. That’s how this week’s hearing in Vancouver got underway, and the national tribunal is pending.Ontario ’s commission said it would decline to take the case because Ontario’s Human Rights Code “does not give the Commission the jurisdiction to deal with the content of magazine articles through the complaints process.” But in their statement, they took the opportunity to condemn Steyn and Maclean’s because they have “a broader duty to express [their] opinion regarding issues that are brought to [their] attention which have implications from a human rights perspective.” They continued:
The Commission is concerned that since the September 2001 attacks, Islamophobic attitudes are becoming more prevalent in society and Muslims are increasingly the target of intolerance, including an unwillingness to consider accommodating some of their religious beliefs and practices.
Unfortunately, the Maclean’s article, and others like it, are examples of this. By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to “the West,” this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice towards Muslims and others. An extreme illustration of this is a “blog” discussion concerning the article that was brought to the attention of the Commission which, among many things, called for the mass killing, deportation or conversion of Muslim Canadians.
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See also this National Review interview with Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne.
From The Globe and Mail:
The man whose controversial writing is in front of a B.C. Human Rights tribunal is daring the system to rule against him.
An article written by Mark Steyn and published in Maclean’s magazine in 2006 was considered hateful and contemptful of Muslims by some critics.
It prompted two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress to file a formal complaint over “The Future Belongs to Islam,” which was an excerpt from a book written by Mr. Steyn.
“We want to lose,” Mr. Steyn said Friday.
“We want to lose so we can take it to a real court and if necessary up to the Supreme Court of
Canada and we can get the ancient liberties of free-born Canadian citizens that have been taken away from them by tribunals like this.”
“We want those ancient civil liberties restored.”
Mr. Steyn said he’s “terrified” that the issue will be dismissed by the tribunal because the lawyer for the congress “put on such a staggeringly inept case.”
Though not present for the whole week-long hearing, Mr. Steyn has not been shy about how he feels towards the tribunal. He’s called its members “pretend judges” and the system a joke.
“I think this court shames the province of British Columbia and is simply incompatible with the traditions of a great free society with a long, legal inheritance,” he said.
The human rights movement began with Soviet “dissidents”, many of whom were/are KGB agents; its current support of Islam fits in with grey terror, as described by GRU defector Vladimir Rezun (nom de plume Viktor Suvorov).
The People’s Cube has produced an excellent satire of pro-jihadist human rights groups.
